Where Islam spreads, freedom dies

The authorities in Burma are carrying out a secret programme of ethnic cleansing of stateless Muslims, demolishing their communities and bulldozing historic mosques, The Times has learnt.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled the western port of Sittwe after bloody conflict with Buddhist members of the Rakhine ethnic group. The state authorities, supported by the national Government, have taken advantage of the unrest to flatten Muslim neighbourhoods, forcibly close Muslim-owned shops and demolish mosques, making it impossible for the displaced Rohingya to return to their homes.

“This is a case of genocide, going on now,” said Kyaw Hla Aung, a Rohingya and former political prisoner, who works for the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières. “Their plan is to move all the Rohingya out.”

The ethnic cleansing has taken place under the noses of UN aid workers, who are tending to the estimated 70,000 displaced people in Rakhine State, but who say they know nothing of the destruction of the mosques. Sittwe has been riven by ethnic conflict since late May, when reports that a Buddhist girl had been raped by three Rohingya men spread through Rakhine State.

On June 3, ten Muslim men travelling by bus near Sittwe were beaten to death by a large group of Rakhine. On June 8, several days of rioting, killing and the burning of houses began in Sittwe and in remote northern communities close to the border with Bangladesh. Estimates of the number of dead range from an official figure of 87 to several hundred.

It was in the second half of June that the authorities embarked on the systematic clearance of the areas damaged by the arson, witnesses told The Times. The clearance was carried out with the participation of the national and state governments: 200 firemen were sent from Rangoon and one of President Thein Sein’s deputy ministers was on hand.

The Times visited five mosques in Sittwe which, by the account of local Buddhist Rakhine, were demolished by bulldozers a fortnight after the violence had ended. They included Musa Dewan Mosque, which dated from the 19th century when Burma was a British colony. Like the other mosques, it was structurally intact after the violence, despite superficial scorching of its walls.

“I was so surprised,” said Khine Soe Linn, a Rakhine man who saw firemen removing furniture and preparing to demolish the Abdul Hadi Mosque on Main Road in Sittwe. “This mosque had hardly been damaged, but they were knocking it down.”

Rohingya leaders identified four other mosques that they said had been destroyed. Buddhist Rakhine, who were picking over waste ground where Rohingya houses once stood, said that three other mosques in the Narzi area had been razed by bulldozers as well as the two seen by The Times. At Police Town Mosque, young men used a sledgehammer to break up the largely intact building and removed the bricks on a handcart, unhindered by officers from a large police headquarters 100 metres down the road.

The few mosques allowed to remain standing appear to be in tourist areas where their absence would be noticed by outsiders. The Shah Khan Mosque, close to Sittwe airport, remains, but its interior has been taken over by a family of dogs, unclean animals in Islam, and its looted interior is littered with pages torn from the Koran and with the fragments of petrol bombs.

Rohingya people were perpetrators, as well as victims, of the violence. But in Sittwe, at least, they have come off much worse. Apart from a single enclave, whose inhabitants are unable to leave their homes for fear of attack, most of the estimated 100,000 Rohingya in Sittwe — half the city’s former population — have fled, mainly to wretched camps with food shortages, bad hygiene, disease and a lack of doctors.

According to Buddhist aid workers, fewer than 4,000 Rakhine live as refugees in Sittwe.

Even the trees have been chopped down in the cleared areas. One Rohingya, Hla Mtun Maung, described how his pharmacy in the municipal market was seized by the authorities, along with the stalls of other Muslim traders.

When the head of the UN in Burma, Ashok Nigam, visited Sittwe, he was told that the areas had been cleared for “town planning”.

Hla Thein, the attorney-general of the Rakhine State government, told The Times that the damaged buildings were removed because they were “not good to look at” and would inflame angry feelings. Asked why the mosques had been demolished, Mr Hla Thein said: “As far as I know, there was no demolition of mosques. Foreigners twist the truth.”

One of the abiding truisms of bloggers is that Buddhists are extreme pacifists and non-violent. This misconception is fostered by the Dalai Lama.

However Buddhists can be just as violent and intolerant as the worst. For instance, post-Tsunami in Asia, Shri Lankan Buddhists beat and drove away Shri Lankan Christians who had gathered at an aid centre. The irony (or gratitude), that the aid was from the Christian West, never occurred to any of them.

I loved this phrase. It describes exactly what The times and most of ( = mainstream) 'western' media is doing now with the muslim matter (this is for what they - the press and commies - want 'freedom of the press').

But I am so happy to hear this.

Those satanic heathens have two homes which are known as pakistan and bangladesh. If muslims don't like what is going on there (in Burma), then they must repatriate their colonists.

Non-muslims don't have the duty of keeping the virulent and violent muslim heathen pest inside their territories. And muslims don't have the right of insulting our way of life, beliefs (religious ones included) wihout geting unharmed without expecting consecuences....

And i wish the press worried about the DISGRACES that SUFFER NON-muslims under muslim rule as much as they care about the (false) 'disgraces' of muslims. But you know, that won't occur.

The Dalai Lama is a deluded fool who has publically stated that Islam is a beautiful religion of peace. Also, he speaks only for the relatively small population of Tibetan Buddhists, not all Buddhists.

As for the rest of your argument, I'll take even the warrior Buddhist monks of medieval Japan over Muslims any day.